Mai Serhan on Exile, Form and the Making of a Writer
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Hi Mai, could you start by giving readers a sense of what I Can Imagine It for Us is about – or at least, how you see its story?
The memoir looks at the ripple effects of 1948; how that moment of displacement shaped my family across generations. It’s about how being uprooted affects who we become, how we relate to one another, and how we try to make sense of where we come from.
The structure is braided and hybrid, with three interwoven storylines. The main thread is set in China, where my father spent the last decade of his life working in the export business. It follows his final year, and then what happened after he died, when I had to deal with the mess of his finances and, through that process, ended up learning a lot about him that I hadn’t known. The second thread imagines pre-1948 al-Kabri, our village in Acre. I wanted to reconstruct that place, to bring it back to life on the page as a way of healing something in my father, even after his death. The third storyline is my own coming-of-age in the 1980s and 90s, moving between Cairo, Cyprus, Beirut and Abu Dhabi. It’s about what life felt like during those years, when my father was still around and my parents were still together, and how that time shaped me.
As you mention, the book is told in fragments rather than in any kind of linear arc. Why did you think that structure was right for this story? How did it develop?
From the start, I knew the story wasn’t going to be told in a straight line; it just didn’t feel right. I wanted the structure to mirror the themes I was working with. Like, when I think about diaspora, the image that comes to mind looks more like a scattering or dispersion. So the way the story’s told had to feel scattered too, in a purposeful way. I used whatever tools I had to help the story speak for itself.
As I was reading it, there were parts that reminded me of your poems from Cairo: the undelivered letters, the direct address to your father. Even in the way the text is laid out on the page. Do you see it as in some way indebted to poetry? Do you have any strong feelings about being considered a poet, first and foremost, versus a memoirist?
Poetry definitely had a big influence on this. I wasn’t just after the facts, I was trying to evoke an emotional experience, and poetry has this way of getting at that kind of truth. It does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to language. In some ways, you could even see the memoir as a long poem.
As for labels, I don’t really think of myself as just one thing. I’ve moved between genres; I started out writing fiction, then got into poetry and I’ve always been drawn to different ways of telling a story. So no, I wouldn’t call myself strictly a poet, even though I really value what poetry can do; how it can reach under the surface and touch a raw nerve.
I love what Ocean Vuong said about the novel being like a Noah’s Ark, that it can hold all kinds of forms. That really resonates with me. I think my work moves in a similar way. I’m always shifting modes to be as honest as I can. I’m constantly adjusting things to find what hits hardest. If something needs a bit of reflection, or feels more like an essay, or needs a strong narrative push, I’ll go with that. That’s what I’m looking for.
So as you were editing, you were moving fragments around, repositioning them to amplify that effect? Is that how it worked?
Not so much during the editing process as much as after the manuscript was ready. Now, if I have a reading event or a colleague asks for an excerpt, I’ll often mix and match. The fragments can be reshuffled in different ways, and sometimes new threads or connections pop up when I do that.
Diaspora life comes with its own kind of weight. We’re not in the rubble, but we carry it inside us.
At the beginning, I approached the structure like a story. I thought about the usual stuff: what kicks things off, what’s at stake, where it all builds to. I had a loose arc and some scenes I knew I wanted to hit. But once I actually started writing, I found myself working more like a poet. I’d land in a scene, and then use poetic tools to shape it, give it texture.
There are all these formal aspects to the book, but it’s also rich in content. On the one hand, the story is very particular – it could only be about your family, your father – but it also gestures towards a universal Palestinian story. How do you think about that balance?
The idea, really, is to see how a personal story can hold something bigger, something that resonates beyond just one family. What I’m writing about is specific to my own experience, but I know there are millions of other Palestinians in the diaspora who’ve lived through different versions of the same story. Over the last 75 years, we’ve ended up in all kinds of places, taken different paths, but it all traces back to the same root: the Nakba in 1948.
Themes like exile, identity, grief, memory, belonging, resistance, they’re all part of what it means to be Palestinian. Each of us carries a piece of that story. And when you put all those pieces side by side, it’s like a huge patchwork; messy at times, beautiful, complex, but also deeply connected.
That idea is evident even within your family. You have relatives in Beirut, in Egypt, in the Gulf and your father in China. Even within one family, there’s this kaleidoscopic approach to how to live after 1948.
Totally. I was part of this think tank recently with twelve other Palestinians. Some were living in Occupied Palestine with Israeli passports, a few were from Gaza and the rest of us were scattered across the diaspora, in places like Lebanon, Jordan, the UK and the US. It was really eye-opening to see where our experiences overlapped and where they didn’t.
What hit me most was this difference: those of us in the diaspora often tend to center Palestine in our work; maybe because we’re far and trying to connect. But for people living under occupation, it’s not about memory or longing, it’s right there in front of them, every single day. It’s immediate, it’s constant, and it’s fucking hard in a completely different way.
There was a sense of familiarity in our dynamic, but I also sensed a quiet estrangement.
That’s a kind of wound in itself, isn’t it? There’s a moment where you write that your troubles ‘for the most part are existential and not daily’. What you’re describing about people still living under occupation sort of sums that up. Also, for a lot of people in the West watching a genocide play out online, there’s this sense that whatever problems you have, they’re not the same daily problems as someone looking for food or trying to avoid being bombed.
Yeah, there’s definitely survivor’s guilt. My family’s safe. We have food, we’re not living under threat, we can move freely. We don’t have to carry the passport of the people who occupy us, and we’re not under drones or passing through checkpoints every day.
But still, diaspora life comes with its own kind of weight. There’s the silence we’re expected to keep, the constant distance and that weird feeling that being safe can feel like a kind of betrayal. We’re not in the rubble, but we carry it inside us. That contradiction, being physically far but emotionally tied in, is a big part of what it means to be Palestinian in exile.
A lot of us in the diaspora spend so much time in our heads and bodies, trying to make sense of how we feel, the tension, the grief, the disconnection, and how all of that affects the way we move through the world.
Especially for families that were expelled in 1948, there’s this deep, inherited burden of not being allowed to return. And then you’ve got the so-called peace frameworks, like the Oslo Accords, which just leave us out entirely. They keep pushing a two-state solution, but that vision doesn’t include people like us. And yet, that’s the only version of peace you ever hear in official conversations.
Yes, it’s always on those boundaries, isn’t it?
Yeah, and honestly, it’s maddening. Calling it a two-state ‘solution’ feels like a cruel joke. It’s not a real solution, it’s a massive compromise, and a painful one at that. The 1967 borders only give Palestinians 22% of historic Palestine, which is already less than what the UN proposed back in 1947.
That isn’t peace, it’s ethnic cleansing. When you really look at it, it just writes off millions of us.
One of them, obviously, was your father. He’s such a towering figure in the book – charismatic, loyal and loving in some ways, but also sometimes cruel and patriarchal. Did you find it difficult to write about him?
No, it actually felt freeing. I feel lucky to be a writer. There’s something powerful about being able to take pain and turn it into something creative. But it took me twenty-five years to even feel ready to write this memoir. I needed that time to process, to live a bit more and to be able to look back with some perspective. I’d been carrying this story around for so long that when I finally sat down to write it, it wrote itself.
Writing it was a release. Even though I describe some tough times with my father, the heart of it is love. That’s the legacy I chose to focus on. I don’t believe in black-and-white characters, or easy narratives with heroes and villains. My father went through some serious struggles; loss, displacement, always feeling like he didn’t belong. His anger, his need for control; those were his ways of coping.
It’s not always easy to give grace when someone’s hurt you, but I tried to write him as fully human, flawed and real and complex. In a way, writing about him, and about all of this, was also my way of breaking the silence that’s so often forced on us. Israel wants us quiet. It wants our pain to be so deep that it becomes unspeakable. So telling this story was my own way of resisting, but also of healing. It felt like reclaiming some agency, some space to breathe.
I’m really interested in the way this is also a book about money – how everything that has happened in Palestine and to Palestinians is directly linked to capitalism as a system.
Money is a big part of the memoir, and its connection to colonialism is pretty important too. Money, or capital, has always been one of the main engines behind colonialism, while the people being colonised get stripped of it. That dynamic really shaped my dad into the tough businessman he became.
The whole idea of land as something to be bought and sold wasn’t part of Palestinian culture.
I saw hints of it when I was a kid, especially when we played Monopoly. He’d buy me out of every property, from Old Kent Road all the way up to Mayfair, and then tease me mercilessly for losing. It was as if, through that game, he was rewriting his Nakba script.
For him, money became this way to survive, but in the end, it was kind of an illusion. He chased it hard, but it came with a cost. I think that constant chase was a big part of what led to his downfall.
Wealth is portrayed almost as a substitute for statehood, for security. That strikes me as part of the Arab experience that really differs from someone’s experience of class and wealth in the UK.
What statehood, really? Across much of the Arab world, you’ve got military regimes and absolute monarchies, basically different flavors of dictatorship. And when it’s not that, it’s usually puppet governments propped up by the U.S. and its allies. It’s not about ideals or justice; it’s about money and power. That’s become painfully obvious since the Israeli genocide in Gaza started.
We’re living in a new kind of colonialism. The armies might have pulled back physically, but control is still there, through surveillance, cyber attacks, US military bases and economic dependence. Without real, independent states, the whole system is broken, and people just try to find their own way through the mess.
In a situation like that, money ends up standing in for safety and independence. It feels like a way to hold onto some control, even if it’s an illusion. And that’s the weird paradox: wealth promises protection, but it’s also how people get pushed aside and stripped of what they have.
Another thing that runs through the book, both as symbol and commodity, is the land itself – land as something you can be exiled from, but also something that can be bought and sold. You discuss the trope of Palestinians selling their land. Can you explain that for us?
Yeah, there’s this really common and hurtful myth that Palestinians sold their land, and it’s flat-out not true. I address that in the book. My aunt gave me a letter from my grandfather, written back in 1936 during the British Mandate. In it, he warns about how the British were buying up land for the Jewish National Fund, often from wealthy Arabs who didn’t even live in Palestine but owned property there.
While digging into this, I found out there was even a company set up in Beirut just to handle land sales in southern Lebanon and Palestine. I traced which families were involved, how much land got sold, and where it all went. I didn’t want to make claims without solid facts. It was important to me to be precise and call things by their real names.
The whole idea of land as something to be bought and sold wasn’t part of Palestinian culture. For Palestinians, land is about belonging, it’s not a commodity.
Which leads us to the depictions of Palestine itself. The book evokes the sensory joy of pre-Nakba Acre – food, landscape, community. How did you reconstruct spaces that are essentially impossible to visit?
Since I’ve never actually been there, there’s this kind of romantic glow that sneaks into how I see the place, like it’s something almost biblical, a Garden of Eden. The village had four natural springs. That immediately made me think of the four rivers beneath Adam’s feet in the Bible.
Growing up, my family always told stories about how lush the land was, how everything grew there, every fruit and vegetable you could imagine. They painted this picture of a peaceful, perfect village. But the stories were always kind of piecemeal. No one really wanted to go too deep. They’d say things like, ‘Oh, we had horse stables,’ and then quickly change the subject. There was always this talk about how privileged we were, how important the family had been. I noticed how my family carried themselves like royalty, like that privilege was still hanging around, even after everything was lost. And I guess I picked up some of that too.
When I decided to write about it, I traveled to Lebanon and met someone who I believe was my dad’s only real confidante. He took me to visit his aunt who was ninety-four at the time, around 2021. She lived in south Beirut, near the Burj el-Brajneh refugee camp, one of the oldest and most well-known Palestinian camps in Lebanon. Ninety-five percent of the people there come from my village, al-Kabri.
He gave me a book called al–Kabri: Garden of Eden, or something like that in Arabic. The cover art had a lush landscape with a waterfall, like a secret garden. The book preserved everything about life before 1948, funerals, weddings, kids’ games, the fruits and vegetables people grew, who the families were, what they did and their descendants.
Through that book, I learned so much about my grandfather, who died when I was only eight years old. I hadn’t realised that my family wasn’t exaggerating. I always knew he was a political figure, but I didn’t know just how widely that was recognised, beyond our family stories.
It’s a very moving moment when you discover that. This is also very much a book about being a daughter, and about being a woman. How consciously did you want gender to be a central theme?
It just feels natural for me to talk about it, because I never agreed with the way he treated me. I never believed I was any less capable than my father just because I’m a woman. It always felt so strange, like, there was no evidence of inferiority in me, so why treat me that way? It made me start wondering what was really behind it.
The way I see it now, after losing everything, he needed something, or someone, to have control over. And that ended up being me. It was like he needed to say, You’re mine, and I decide what you do, just to feel like he still had some power left in his life.
His world was chaotic, especially in China. But it’s also important to remember where he came from. He was from a village, not Jerusalem or one of the big cities. Even though his family was prominent, they were landowners, not urban elites. And unlike his brothers, he didn’t have a Western-style education. The only world he knew was that of a villager suddenly thrown into something much bigger, and I think that shaped how he tried to survive.
Yes, the sections in China with your father – chaotic is the word.
Most of the time, I was just led from place to place, watching the chaos around him unfold. I wasn’t allowed to be part of it. I was a smoker, but God forbid he ever caught me with a cigarette. And I couldn’t talk to any of the men around him, they wouldn’t even make eye contact. I suppose they were scared of him.
I remember one time at an airport, I just walked away from him because I needed space. Then I heard him yelling my name across the gates: Maaaai! I stood there thinking, Should I answer? Or just disappear and never come back? In those moments, it felt like I was caught between wanting to get away and being pulled into something I couldn’t control.
And this was all taking place in China, which adds another layer of cultural alienation. Have you been back since? What feelings do you have when you think about China as a place?
That was the point, right? To stretch alienation to the extreme.
No, the last time I went was after he died. I’d never go back, there are too many memories that colour the country for me. It feels like a wound site. It’s a shame, though. I wish I could see it with fresh eyes, go now, as an adult, and actually take in the culture. But back then, it felt like a rollercoaster I hadn’t signed up for, and the whole thing was just really isolating.
At the same time, the parts in China are deeply compelling. They read almost like a detective story, especially in Part Two. Did you feel a pull to make it page-turning?
Yeah, I wanted to write the kind of book that’s hard to put down; that was clear to me from the start. I like looking at the books that really pull me in and asking myself, Why can’t I stop reading this? What is it that keeps me hooked? I like analysing other writers’ work, thinking about how they pace things, when they reveal just enough, when they hold back, when they drop a detail that makes you lean in a little closer. I think a lot about timing, when to tease something, when to mislead you a bit, when to give you a piece of the puzzle but not the full picture. That kind of structure really excites me.
Part Two especially, with all the money being stolen and everyone being suspect, felt like a kind of whodunnit. I still don’t know whodunnit. Maybe it was Malek. Maybe Ou. Maybe Abu Hazem. I really don’t know, and I kind of made peace with that ambiguity.
When you say you’re inspired by work that’s compelling in that way, what are some examples that epitomise it for you?
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? will probably sound like a strange reference; it’s not Palestinian, it’s not Arab and it doesn’t deal with the same political themes. But it really hit me. There was something about the honesty, the rawness and the way Jeanette Winterson wrote about mother-daughter dynamics and the search for belonging that stayed with me.
The Return by Hisham Matar was another big one. He goes back to Libya to try to find out what happened to his father, who disappeared into Abu Salim prison; his body was never found. And that’s what keeps you reading: will he find out the truth?
I think a lot about the difference between expectation and anticipation. Expectation is when you know exactly what’s coming; anticipation is that feeling of not knowing which way it’ll go. That’s what keeps you engaged.
I let go of the dream of getting into the big Western publications. I stopped chasing that kind of validation.
Capote does this brilliantly in In Cold Blood. You know the family is going to die, it’s not a spoiler, but you still get pulled into their lives for a hundred pages. There’s this sense of doom hanging over everything, and you keep thinking, When is it going to happen? You get attached, and that makes it all the more devastating.
I played with that idea in my own book. Right from the start, I tell you my father is going to die. But then the question becomes, how? And that’s what pulls the reader forward.
The title, I Can Imagine It for Us, is truncated from a longer phrase. Can you share how it came about and what it means to you?
Yeah, the memoir actually started as a writing prompt. In 2017, I joined a creative writing residency at the American University in Cairo, and before our first session, we were asked to describe the place we’re from. I wrote a short 500-word piece, which I later submitted to Oyster River Pages, and it ended up being long-listed for their memoir award. That felt like the beginning of something.
After I finished the memoir, I sent the first 20 pages to the Narratively Memoir Prize, and it was chosen as a finalist. They published it with the title I Have Never Been to Where I’m From, But I Will Imagine It for Us. At the time, the working title for the full book was The Renegades, reflecting how my father and I were outsiders, not only to political systems but also to family, land and borders.
But once the book was finished, that title started to feel too fixed. It didn’t match the fluid and lyrical tone of the writing. So I started looking for something that felt softer, that would also center the idea of return, and I decided to go with Return is a Thing of Amber.
But that sounds too similar to The Hare with Amber Eyes?
Yeah, and then there’s also Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. At one point, I was actually thinking of calling the book The Outpost, but my publisher wasn’t into it and asked me to come up with more options. So I shared I Can Imagine It For Us with a close group of writer friends, and pretty much everyone agreed, that was the one. It felt empowering and forward-thinking, and it addressed a collective.
I think it’s the perfect title. I can’t imagine this book being called The Renegades or The Outpost. Can you talk a bit about the journey to find a publisher, particularly post-October 7? How did you end up with AUC?
I can’t imagine this being called anything other than, I Can Imagine It for Us!
So, I was in a workshop and submitted a fifteen-page excerpt from the memoir to my tutor, which he really responded to. I later emailed him to thank him and asked if he’d be open to introducing me to his agent. He said of course, and put me in touch with Peter Fraser Dunlop.
They got back to me on New Year’s Eve with this incredible email – honestly, I should frame it. They signed me and said the team was really excited about the manuscript. Even the film department was interested in its potential. It felt like things were starting to happen.
We spent about four months editing and getting it ready to go out. The first major opportunity was the Frankfurt Book Fair. Then October 7 happened. Just two days later, the fair announced it would spotlight Israeli voices and cancelled four Palestinian events, including one with Adania Shibli, who wrote Minor Detail. So my agent didn’t pitch my book there. They suggested we try again at the London Book Fair a few months later, but that came and went, and it still didn’t go out. I was told the mood in the publishing business there had shifted. Everyone was looking for things they thought would sell easily: celebrity memoirs, cookbooks, self-help, influencer content. And this didn’t fit that market.
At the same time, I was getting these really thoughtful rejections. Bloomsbury, for instance, said they knew they’d probably regret passing, but passed anyway. That’s when I started to feel impatient. What exactly was I waiting for? Why a British publisher? Why keep knocking on those doors?
I knew people in this region were ready for this story. It mattered here in a different way. What’s happening in Palestine belongs to this part of the world, and that felt like the right place for the work to land. So I changed direction. I let go of the dream of getting into the big Western publications. I stopped chasing that kind of validation. Why should our work have to be legitimised over there first? Why not build up our own platforms and strengthen the literary landscape here? That shift led me to start publishing more and more work with literary magazines in the Arab region. I decided to pitch the manuscript to AUC Press, and they said yes almost right away. It felt right, like the book had finally found its place.
Given that switch, do you have any desire to work with a UK publisher in the future?
I’m happy to work with anyone who’s clearly taken a stand on Palestine. But if they haven’t, then no, I’m just not interested.
Final question. You’ve talked a lot about understanding your father psychologically and almost psychoanalysing him through the book. What did writing it teach you about yourself?
I realised I’d been hiding behind my dad’s story for half the book. I wasn’t sure who the hero was. It was easier to make him the hero; I didn’t want to step into the spotlight. I suppose it felt a bit aggrandising, to be the ‘hero.’
At first, the book ended with Part Two; there was no third act. But then my tutor, Julie Wheelwright, asked me, ‘Where’s the resolution?’ She pointed out key scenes from Parts One and Two, like the moment with Elias Khoury when I uncover the family history through his novel, and said they belonged in Part Three. She said, ‘This is a turning point for you.’ And I said, ‘But I’m not the hero.’ She responded, ‘Who else could it be? Your dad dies halfway through. Then you go to China, and now you’ve become the writer of this story.’
That’s when I understood the resolution had to be about me stepping out of his shadow. Part Three had to be about healing through storytelling, about forgiveness. It became a Künstlerroman. It’s really about a writer finding her own direction and voice. That last part is me claiming this story as mine, not his and looking for authorship and some hope.
Mai Serhan, thank you.
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Mai Serhan is a Palestinian-Egyptian writer. She is the author of CAIRO: the undelivered letters, winner of the 2022 Center for Book Arts Poetry Chapbook Award and finalist for the 2021 Quarterly West Chapbook Award. Her poem ‘Truce’ was a winner of the 2021 Lunch Ticket Twitter Poetry Contest, and her memoir, I Can Imagine it For Us, was a finalist for the 2022 Narratively Memoir Prize.
Jamie Cameron was born in Swansea, Wales, and grew up in the Midlands. He is the Managing Editor of The London Magazine.
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